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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Having given up trying to add a fourth drive to a what was three disk raid5 array. i was wondering was can be done to clean up all the disks ready for a clean install of a four disk raid5 array. if you can link me to a good tutorial on the matter that would be grand.

So it tells me one drive failed and another is a spare i know that much. If the numbers in the square brackets indicates the channel on the SATA card that these drives are attached to that would be wrong as there are only 4 ports and they are listed as 0,1,2,3.

Could this be my problem? If so how can i rectify this?

i should also point out that the contents of the above "cat /proc/mdstat" command was and is to be best of my recollection identical with both times i tried to build/create array.

It'd probably be helpful to have more details of what you did, what distro you're using, what hardware you're using etc. The particulars can be important.

There are any number of ways of telling drives apart. You have to be methodical about what you're doing. Getting in the machine and noting the drive models and numbers and which port they're attached to is helpful. You can find a lot of information with dmesg as well. Be methodical here as well.

As far as SATA issues and RAID, it depends a lot on the distro, as I mentioned. Slackware has excellent documentation included in the release. I mentioned one Ubuntu resource that seems straightforward above. Additional links that might be helpful follow:

Last time i checked the forums.debian.net wasn't as active i sight as you would hope to get a reasonably sharp response. I guess it might have changed.

sata driver: sata_sil

4 port Silicon 31** Image Card.

I knew when i bought it that it wasn't a hardware sata card. At the time of purchase i didn't think i would every have enough to buy a hardware. perhaps you guys could provide the names of good quality brands for one. That would be very helpful.

Following is the content of dmesg with that details my drives are referenced:

but say with a command like cfdisk /dev/sd{whichever drive i'm trying to look at i get unformatted response for the contents of the two drives in question}

I would most certainly bank of neither drive being faulty due to their age more than anything.

My most underlining thought tells me that the kernel is interferring with drive channel assignment. Meaning that drive at /dev/sda1 would be assigned channel 0 and then assigned to channel 3 at next boot but i thought this only happened at boot.

So if i can create and format the result of a three disk array totalling 1.7TB then i can be pretty certain debian doesn't come with GPT support and will need to find a reference material to help instruct me how to add it to teh kernel.